CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Astronomers reported Wednesday that the nearest Earth-like planet might be just 13 light-years away — or about 77 trillion miles. That planet hasn’t been found yet but should be there based on the team’s study of red dwarf stars. Galactically speaking, that’s right next door.

If our Milky Way galaxy were shrunk to the size of the United States, the distance between Earth and its closest Earth-like neighbor would be the span of New York’s Central Park, said Harvard University graduate student Courtney Dressing, the study’s lead author.

Small, cool red dwarfs are the most common stars in our galaxy, numbering at least 75 billion. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics team estimates 6 percent of red dwarf stars have Earth-like planets.

These planetary candidates are quite different from Earth because of the differences between their red dwarf stars and the sun, said the report’s co-author, David Charbonneau.

Because the red dwarfs are so much smaller, potentially habitable planets would need to orbit much closer than the Earth does to the sun. They likely would be rocky, the astronomers said, but different types of atmospheres could lead to different types of life. The Associated Press

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